My the­sis was awarded a price for the best Mas­ters The­sis at our uni­ver­sity. Although the com­pe­ti­tion was not that large, I am proud nev­er­the­less. I should be pretty much unstop­pable now :)

Another week, another conference :)

This time, it was the EC-TEL07 (Euro­pean Con­fer­ence on Tech­nol­ogy Enhanced Learn­ing) in Crete. Elisa Dalla Vec­chia and I pre­sented the MACE project (slides, video 1, video 2) and besides, met a lot of nice people.

The con­fer­ence itself was really well orga­nized. The keynotes (Her­mann Mau­rer and Bruce Ster­ling) were excel­lent and big pic­ture, cov­er­ing a wide range of dig­i­tal lifestyle top­ics and wild ideas. Dig­i­tal quacks & char­la­tans, why Google is not so non-evil after all, telepa­thy is triv­ial, fly­ing cars. No kid­ding. Many of the ses­sion talks, on the other hand, were not that excit­ing at all. I have the feel­ing many peo­ple in this area first build a “frame­work for…” before actu­ally try­ing out some ideas on real learners.

More info on the con­fer­ence blog, wiki and the flickr stream.

Greet­ings to Mar­tin Mem­mel from DFKI, who I met to talk about the ALOE project and Chris­t­ian Glahn, who pre­sented nice work on Smart Indi­ca­tors for learner feed­back, and Joris Klerkx, who is quite into infor­ma­tion visu­al­iza­tion. I am look­ing for­ward to future devel­op­ments, guys!

And just for the record, here are my favorite insider nerd joke con­fer­ence memes:

• Magic doesn’t scale.
• Minigolf? Ouzome!
• “Every­thing is a plat­form” — freaky!
• Telepa­thy is trivial.
• “Any­ways — back to me”

Much too late, but bet­ter than never: I attended the lovely FIND07 work­shop in Regens­burg, pre­sent­ing my work on the Elas­tic Lists. In the begin­ning, I felt a bit weird at the con­fer­ence, being the only designer in sight, but the work­shop itself was pretty inspir­ing and maybe also fruit­ful for the future.

So spe­cial thanks and greet­ings to

• Gio­vanni M. Sacco for the pio­neer­ing work, and the kind orga­ni­za­tion and intro­duc­tion to the workshop
• Sébastien Ferré for remind­ing me of for­mal con­cept analy­sis again, and the very inter­est­ing Camelis tool
• Yan­nis Tzitzikas for the very inter­est­ing talk and the “nego­ti­a­tion approach” to tax­on­omy map­ping — check You Say… We Say…

You can find my slides here. The change blind­ness video was copied from here.